Biome Blueprints

353 ready-made house and base designs for PlanBuild, sorted by biome and revealed as you find the materials they are made of.

Open your Blueprint Rune and there is a tab for each biome, plus one for furniture and one for ornaments. Every tab is ordered cheapest first. Pick a design, place it, and the ground under it flattens to meet the floor.

What is in it

Valheim draws 90 pieces per tab and quietly ignores the rest, so a biome with more designs than that spills into a second tab rather than losing them.

78 are generated house designs — huts, cottages, longhouses, stilt houses, manors, great halls and stone-founded villas, one set per biome.

275 are community builds by 89 builders, imported with their names and descriptions intact. See Credits.

How it works

Designs unlock with your materials, the same way vanilla build pieces do. A design appears once you have found what it is made of — so a Meadows cottage is there from the start, and a black marble hall waits for the Mistlands. Nothing is hidden behind a config or a cheat.

Every design shows its full material list as item icons under the build menu, red where you are short, exactly like any other piece.

The ground is flattened for you, but only where it needs it. Each design carries terrain markers sized to its own footprint plus two floor tiles of clearance. Before placing, every marker is measured against the ground beneath it: the ones over ground that already matches are dropped, so a design put down on level ground — or on a floor inside a house — leaves the terrain alone entirely. On a slope it levels the plot as you would expect, and a design half on a slope levels only that half.

Nothing here needs another mod. Every design was checked against the game's own prefab list; builds that needed furniture or building mods were left out rather than shipped half-built.

In the build menu

Every tab is ordered by size, smallest first. The first designs you see are the ones you can realistically build; a 39,000-piece cathedral is at the end where it belongs. The piece count is written on every design.

Mouse wheel moves through the designs. Q and E change tab — vanilla treats a scroll notch as a tab change, which with this many tabs is very easy to do by accident.

Placing a design deselects it. Keeping one selected keeps its whole preview alive and drawn every frame, on top of the plan you just placed, and nobody places the same base twice in a row.

Trees and rocks in the way flash red, and the design will not go down. Press place and anything standing inside the design — trees, stumps, boulders — flashes red for ten seconds, and placing is refused until they are cleared. Turn it off, or allow a second click to override it, in the config below.

Removing a design you have placed

You do not have to take it apart piece by piece. PlanBuild's own Tools tab has this:

Performance, and low-end machines

The one expensive thing this mod does is the placement preview — the ghost that follows your cursor. A 15,000-piece base means 15,000 pieces of ghost, and that is a lot to draw.

So the mod welds that preview into a handful of meshes. This is why a big design pauses for a moment the first time you select it, and never again. That pause is the optimisation running, not the mod hanging.

Once a design is down, three more things keep a large base affordable, all of them on by default and all switchable in the settings below:

• Small pieces do not cast shadows. Every renderer that casts is drawn again for each shadow cascade, and in a big base most pieces are 1x1 blocks and beam ends whose shadows nobody can pick out. Walls, roofs and floors keep theirs, so the building still casts its own shape. Measured on a 20,000-piece base this alone took the frame rate from 18 to 24.
• Small pieces stop being drawn at a distance. Most build pieces ship with no cull point at all, so a pillar base three hundred metres away is still being submitted. Walls, roofs and floors are never affected.
• Smoke is capped. Every smoke particle in Valheim is a physics body, and the game's own limit retires one particle per spawn while every fire near you keeps making more.

If your machine struggles:

• Prefer designs under about 1,000 pieces. The piece count is written on every design.
• Settings → Graphics: turn down Shadow Quality, Vegetation, and Draw Distance. Shadows and vegetation cost the most while a large preview is on screen.
• Place from a little further back. A preview that fills the screen costs more to draw than the same preview seen whole.
• The pause on first selection scales with piece count — the largest design here is 16,568 pieces and takes about a second, once per session.

Settings

BepInEx/config/OverDrive.BiomeBlueprints.cfg. Every one of these can be changed while the game is running; the ground and performance settings take effect on the next placement or the next piece that loads, with no restart.

If a large base runs slowly

The mod's own costs are dealt with — the placement preview is welded into a few meshes, and small pieces neither cast shadows nor draw at distance. What is left is the size of the build itself, and two of Valheim's own graphics settings matter more than anything here:

• Lod Bias multiplies every level-of-detail distance, so at 2 the game draws full-detail meshes twice as far out — and halves the effect of this mod's distance culling. Try 1.
• Point Light Shadows renders a shadow cubemap, six passes, per light. A base with many torches pays that for each of them. Try Off.

Beyond that it is the geometry: a 37,000-piece build inside one 64m sphere carries something like 70 million vertices, which no card draws smoothly. The same build spread over a few hundred metres runs fine, because the cost is per area rather than per world.

Installing

Use a mod manager. It will pull in the dependencies:

• BepInEx
• Jotunn
• HookGenPatcher
• PlanBuild — this mod is a catalogue for PlanBuild and does nothing without it

Thumbnails ship with the mod. You never need to run bp.regenthumbnails — and on a catalogue this size you should not: it builds the full preview of every design and frees none of them, so it runs the game out of memory. If you add your own blueprints to the folder and want pictures for them, biomeblueprints.thumbnails in the console does only the ones that are missing, and frees each one as it goes.

Get your build in the mod

Send a build and it can ship in the next version, credited to you.

Submit a build →

The form asks for the .blueprint file, the name you want credited, the biome it belongs in, and whether it needs anything outside the base game. It also asks your permission to ship it — the mod redistributes the file, so that is the part that lets it.

Saving one: Blueprint Rune → Capture → point at your build → Alt+click to grab the connected pieces, then name it and save. The file lands in BepInEx/config/PlanBuild/blueprints/.

Before you send it:

You do not need to add terrain markers or a thumbnail — both are generated when the build is brought in. The name on #Creator: is what gets credited, so put yours there when you save it.

Credits

The 275 imported designs are the work of these builders, and the mod exists because they shared them. Names are as they appear in the blueprint files.

Sheepshank (41) · Bri Games (39) · Madzobuild (10) · Monkey (9) · BaDmIn (8) · Wissman (8) · Admin Veseljko (7) · Builder (7) · The Architect (7) · Ivor The Smol (6) · Sirna (6) · Modestypooh (5) · Aodi (4) · BerserkTBuilDeR (4) · Mister (4) · Ragnar (4) · Thysicus (4) · Abzul (3) · Dana (3) · Halvar (3) · Ise LeGaCy (3) · Lacko- (3) · Neletit (3) · Softpea (3) · Tester (3) · Arkitek (2) · Arthur (2) · Babe (2) · Bhima (2) · Cm Thug (2) · Cornboy (2) · Daft God (2) · Gorthein (2) · Henk Debrook (2) · Lady Silvergrey (2) · Olivanderr (2) · Ulf The Builder (2) · Vrolok (2) · Xxx (2) · Abzulute · Amund · Artio · Astrid Sinjesdo · Atticus · Balgruff · Balin · Black · Blue Chew · Blueprints · BoggyExp · Bri The Phoenix · Builder Babe · Constructor · Cooties · Creative · CrEaTiVe · Deardly · Dumbel · Einherjar · Eric Bloodaxe · Freelift · GunBunny · Halfnate · Henk Vakker · IsE Dawsded · Kambucha · kinesthesia · LoKi · MaCaron · Mad · Magne · Michel · Mördar Erik · Odin · Panagist · PiNdO · Pooh Test · Salty D. · Silent Citizen · Silly Pie · Talathar · Teakeycee · Test · Testiphy · Vinion Odin · Архитектор · Годрик · ЮрЕц · 叶奈法

If one of these is yours and you would rather it were not included, or credited differently, say so and it will be changed or removed.

PlanBuild itself is by MathiasDecrock and marcopogo — this mod would be pointless without it.

Author

Made by lg_9d — instagram.com/lg_9d

Changelog

1.0.3

131 new designs, 353 in total. Imported from community builds, with 30 left out because they need mods this one does not depend on.

Ground

• The ground is only levelled where it needs it. Every terrain marker is now measured against the ground beneath it before placing, and the ones over ground that already matches are dropped. A design placed on level ground, or on a floor inside a house, leaves the terrain untouched; one placed half on a slope levels only that half. Tune with Only flatten ground more uneven than, or turn levelling off entirely with Flatten the ground under a design.
• Placing a design no longer raises a mound. PlanBuild levels toward a marker's height in either direction, and an earlier fix for hovering had pushed the pad up to the lowest dense band of pieces — which on a tower is halfway up the building. 110 designs were lifting the ground, one of them by 43 metres. No design can now raise ground at all.
• The pad digs to the floor, not to the foundations. A stilt house whose posts reach two metres down was digging a two metre pit around itself, leaving the posts standing in a hole.
• The levelled pad stops two floor tiles past the walls, as it always claimed to. It was running 18m past them on median and 28m at worst, because each marker also levels a radius beyond its own centre and nothing accounted for that.
• Its edge grades into the ground instead of ending at a cliff. A plot in a meadow no longer reads as a quarry, and one beside water no longer as a rectangular mesa.
• 23 designs are now levelled across their whole plot. They shipped with the author's own markers covering as little as 2% of their own footprint.

Build menu

• Two new tabs: Furniture and Decoration. A chair and a statue were sitting on a biome tab between two fortresses. Furniture is told from buildings by shape; ornaments could not be — a chessboard is 23.7% floor pieces and a giant cake 12.4%, so both measure as buildings, and a beehive with no floor is identical in shape to a snowflake. So the name its builder gave it decides those, and only where the shape does not contradict it: a tavern called The Valkyrie has a door and stays a building.
• Every tab is ordered by piece count, smallest first. Alphabetical told you nothing about the size of the thing you were about to click.
• The stated piece count was wrong on 125 designs — stripping unplaceable rows never updated it. That number is both what you read in the tooltip and what the tabs are now ordered by.
• Trees and rocks in the way flash red and the design will not go down until they are cleared. Previously a second click placed anyway, which is what a player does to check whether the first click registered.
• Filtering a design out of the menu can no longer leave the selection pointing past the end of its category, which made vanilla throw an exception every frame until another piece was clicked.

Performance in a large base

• Small pieces no longer cast shadows. Measured at 18fps with 20,527 pieces in 64 metres: the shadow casters fell from 99% of renderers to 48% and the frame rate went to 24. Walls, roofs and floors keep theirs, so a building still casts its own shape.
• Small pieces stop being drawn at a distance. Most build pieces ship with no cull point at all, so a pillar base three hundred metres away is still submitted. Walls, roofs and floors are never affected.
• A cap on smoke particles. Each one is a physics body, and the game's own limit of 100 retires one particle per spawn while every fire nearby keeps spawning.
• Placed plan pieces check their support less often. Every one of them re-hashed a string and read a ZDO every frame, for a value that changes only when something near it is built or broken.

Other

• Players can send their own builds in to be featured — there is a form linked from the mod page, and a build that ships keeps its author's name.
• Added biomeblueprints.thumbnails, which regenerates missing thumbnails without running the game out of memory. PlanBuild's own bp.regenthumbnails builds the full preview of every design and never frees any of them, so on a catalogue this size it crashes. Players still need neither.

1.0.2

• Placing a design now clears the selection. It was meant to already, and did not: PlanBuild replaces Player.TryPlacePiece outright and never calls the original, so the patch watching it never saw a placement. The result was two copies of the same base on screen at once - the plan you had just placed, and its ghost still following the cursor.
• Trees and rocks standing inside a design flash red for ten seconds instead of being built over. Press place again while they are flashing to build anyway, or turn it off with Warn about obstacles in the config.
• 23 designs are now levelled across their whole plot. They shipped with the original author's terrain markers, which for these covered as little as 2% of their own footprint - a few patches around a 13,000-piece castle, leaving the rest of it on the hillside. Their own markers are replaced when they do not reach the building, and every design in the catalogue is now checked for this before it can be packaged.
• Half as many terrain markers for the same flattening, so a large design places faster.

1.0.1

Minor fixes.

1.0.0

First release. 222 designs for PlanBuild, in a tab per biome.

Designs

• 78 generated house designs — hut, cottage, house, longhouse, stilt hut/cottage/house, manor, great hall, villa and stone-founded variants, one set per biome.
• 144 community builds by 44 builders, imported with their names, descriptions and credits intact.
• Builds needing furniture or building mods are excluded rather than shipped half-built: every design was checked against the game's own prefab list, and 21 downloads were left out because they need mods that are not dependencies of this one.

Unlocking

• A design appears once you have found the materials it is made of, using the same Player.IsMaterialKnown check vanilla uses on its own build pieces.
• Only the materials a build is actually made of count. A single decorative bear hide will not hide a Black Forest cabin behind the Deep North, and the food on an item stand is not treated as a building material.
• Debug mode and no-build-cost show everything, as they do for vanilla pieces.

In the build menu

• Every design lists its full material cost as item icons, red where you are short.
• Thumbnails ship with the mod. bp.regenthumbnails is never needed.
• The piece grid steps clear of the category tabs when they wrap to a second row.
• The mouse wheel moves through the designs instead of jumping between tabs; Q and E still change tab.
• A biome with more designs than one tab can draw spills into a second ("Ashlands II"), because Valheim draws 90 pieces per tab and silently discards the rest.

Ground

• Each design carries terrain markers covering its own footprint plus two floor tiles of clearance, levelled to the underside of its lowest floor.
• Stray objects a capture swept up — scenery on a neighbouring cliff, items parked far overhead — are excluded from that measurement and pruned from the design.

Performance

• The placement preview of a large design is welded into a few meshes instead of thousands of separate ones, and the pieces it replaces are destroyed rather than merely hidden.
• That welding is done once per design and spread across frames, so it costs a brief pause on first selection rather than a frozen second.